This afternoon, Year 1 children have recreated the Great Fire of London from 1666 in our school fire pit.
We noticed the fire spreading from house to house in the wind and our very own St Paul’s Cathedral was unfortunately destroyed, once again.
Today Year 1 took part in an exciting drama workshop based on the Great Fire of London. First, the children warmed up with a variety of dance and drama activties and then travelled back in time in their time machine to imagine what life was like during the fire. They pretended to walk the streets of London, dodging fire balls and avoiding the flames.
Finally they recreated the fire with materials and movement, starting small and then building the intensity before letting the fire die out.
Today marks the end of our class’ 10 day isolation period and I am thrilled to welcome most of us back on Monday. I am so proud of the way that, as a group, we have persevered through this difficult time. Together, we have acknowledged what we were finding tricky and worked around it.
A huge well done to all our the children in 1C – you are all absolute superstars!
Let’s take a look at some of the learning we’ve been up to over the last 10 days.
Phonics, Writing and Maths:
Over the last 10 days we have continued to engage our learning behaviours and keep our learning moving forwards. In Phonics, we have focused on the sounds o-e phone home and u-e huge brute. In our English lessons we have been looking at information texts and have innovated our model text, as a class, to write a new information text about worms. During our Maths time we concentred on different number bonds and explored different ways of making these.
Reading:
We haven’t had a rest and neither have our reading VIPERS! Over the last 10 days we’ve been using our Vocabulary, Retrieval and Summarise VIPERS when reading stories and non-fiction texts.
Wider Curriculum:
In the afternoons, we have continued to focus on the wider curriculum and have been ACE Dancers, ACE Athletes, ACE Historians, Ace Worshippers and how to be Safe ACE. We have looked at toys from the past and present, listened to stories from both the Bible and the Qu’ran, practised our target throwing and hurdles, choreographed our own dances and thought about how we are feeling about the changes coming up as we begin to think about Year 2.
In other news:
We were really excited to hear that we will have a new Reverend joining us, so we wrote welcome letters to Reverend Lottie!
This week we have been exploring old and new objects. We looked at some old objects and compared them to new ones. We thought about what was similar and what was different between them. Finally we recorded our ideas to share them with each other.
To end our Spring 1 half term, the Year 1 team wanted to create a bit of a showcase of some of the amazing work that has been going on at home.
We are incredibly proud of the effort and engagement that has been going on over the last six weeks.
We’ve had Tough Tortoises when the work was tricky and we persevered through, we’ve had Team Ants working with our adults or brothers and sisters at home, Helpful Hens have been pausing videos and using their previous learning to help them in new activities and I’ve even noticed some Beautiful Butterflies editing and improving their work!
English
In English we have been working around the story Samson’s Titanic Journey by Laura Graham. We thought about how the different classes and used this story to help us with our descriptive writing, as well as post cards and letters.
Week 2: Noticing and wondering about the front cover
Week 3: Using verbs and adjectives to to explain what Samson was doing
Week 4: Using new vocabulary and adjectives to describe the first class dining room
Week 5: Thinking about how Samson was feeling and using “and” to join ideas together
Week 6: Writing letters to Samson’s family
Maths
For our Maths home learning we have been using White Rose Maths Hub videos and our usual Flashback 4s. This half term we have covered shape, addition and subtraction within 20 and numbers to 50. Take a look at some of our Maths work.
Reading
During our Spring 1 home learning we have continued with our Sound of the Week, daily Read Write Inc Phonics lessons, weekly Read Write Inc books, Goldilocks words from our story and some retrieval tasks.
Sound of the Week
Week 2: ir – whirl and twirl
Week 3: ou – shout it out
Week 4: oy – toy for a boy
Week 5: ea – cup of tea
Week 6: oi – spoil the boy
Goldilocks words
Titanic
Our theme for this half term was a history focus as we based the majority of our learning about the Titanic. Take a look at some of the learning taking place at home based on the Titanic.
Wider Curriculum
As always, we have continued to offer our wide and broad curriculum and the children have responded brilliantly. In Science, we started the half term by observing the changes in the seasons and then moved on to learning about the human body. We learned about our body parts and the five main senses. Our RE unit started with learning about the parable of the lost son. This guided our thoughts towards forgiveness and we considered this value in the story as well as when we have shown forgiveness. Then we learned about 4 types of prayer and wrote our own prayers. In PE we have been keeping healthy by taking part in Joe Wicks’ weekly exercise sessions. Linked to the Titanic, in Music we have reflected on the music played in both the first and third class dining rooms and then learned to perform the waltz and the Irish jig. Finally, as part of our PHSE, we consider real life lifesavers and what they do to help make the word a better place.
This week, to end of unit of the Great Fire of London, 1C created a stop motion animation to retell some key events. We worked in groups to produce a background and additional bits to retell a specific part of the story.
We then worked with Mr Moore to add a voice over to make it even more exciting!
This week 1C have become bakers, just like Thomas Farriner, and we worked collaboratively, to bake scones.
We followed a recipe, and noticed imperative verbs such as mix, pour, rub and roll.
This week, as part of our hook for The Great Fire of London, we wrote down things we “can’t do” and burned them on the fire… because there is nothing we can’t do! We noticed once they were gone we could not get them back and then used empathy to think about what that would be like if that happened to our houses.
This week we have been learning about Grace Darling. Today we used dance to work collaboratively as Team Ant to plan and perform a dance to music showing the story of Grace Darling.
